An Insight into Material Memory

Material Memory: Scarlett Budden, Xanthe Burdett, Anna Rocke, Albie Romero, Camilla Schön

and Lulu Stephenson

Text by Sophie Barshall

Studio West, founded by Caroline Boseley, evolved from a West London gallery programme into an artist residency focused on practical mentorship. Recognising unmet needs among emerging artists – specifically gaps in legal literacy, professional strategy and career navigation often unaddressed in art schools – Studio West shifted its model. The residency provides studio space and critical support, enabling artists to develop work freed from the constraints of rapid exhibition cycles. This group exhibition presents new works by the current cohort of Studio West residents: Scarlett Budden, Anna Rocke, Camilla Schön and Lulu Stephenson, as well as former residents Xanthe Burdett and Albie Romero. ‘Material Memory’ showcases the six artists' shared engagement with materiality as a means of psychological excavation.

Scarlett Budden constructs psychologically charged, cinematic paintings that investigate the dynamics of looking. Her work focuses on ambiguous figures that have been closely framed, often with claustrophobic intensity, making reference to the Gothic preoccupation with bodily transformation. Drawing on pre-modern motifs (particularly 15th-century Flemish painting and Renaissance compositional structures), she divides narratives through segmented arches and blocks of negative space, while employing contemporary cinematic framing techniques inspired by films like Suzan Pitt's Asparagus (1979) and Lisa Steele's Birthday Suit (1974). Her process heightens this historical/contemporary tension: photographs become drawings, drawings become paintings, each translation adding layers of remove. Finally, applications of thin glazes distort colour and light to produce an insistent strangeness. Recurring symbols (fish as subconscious, forests as inner terrain, eyes as sites of confrontation) act as psychological conduits within these spatially compressed compositions.

Xanthe Burdett’s practice examines the relationship between human and ecological systems through medieval folklore and Renaissance techniques. Her works – ranging from large canvases to small panels – show figures emerging from transparent washes, dissolving into landscapes of greens and umbers, alongside cropped depictions of birds and foliate heads referencing English church carvings. Her method moves from gestural marks in thin solvents to controlled glazing, creating surfaces that balance clarity and erosion. These technical approaches reflect her conceptual interests: the psychopomp role of animals – a creature, spirit, angel, demon or deity who guides souls to the afterlife – in myth, the subsumption of pagan imagery into Christian iconography and the lingering presence of oral storytelling traditions from her South Devon upbringing. Rather than nostalgic pastoralism, her paintings disrupt the picturesque through deliberate fractures in composition and material.

Anna Rocke builds dense, tactile paintings where domestic and architectural spaces become sites of psychic disturbance. Her distinctive material approach has recently experimented with thickening oil paint using beeswax and ground marble, creating heavily impastoed surfaces that are both sculptural and evocative. These thickly layered grounds warp perspective and imbue seemingly familiar interiors – often inspired by the theatrically preserved rooms of London’s National Trust houses like Ham House – with psychological weight and ambiguity. Rocke’s focus lies in the physical presence of the paint itself, transforming the canvas into a site of half-remembered narratives. Memory, particularly from a child’s perspective (boredom, overactive imagination or patterns in wallpaper that seem to shift and animate), serves as a recurring thread. Her process records the labour of making while suggesting spaces where the mundane feels psychologically charged.

For this exhibition, Albie Romero presents monochromatic paintings that translate personal grief into material form. Working from film photographs – both self-portraits and travel images – he employs a process that mirrors memory's fragmentary nature. These cropped, small-scale works, rendered with soft brushes and deliberate smudging, hover between clarity and dissolution, their blurred edges mimicking memory’s stubborn gaps. The photographic source material carries particular significance, connecting to both his father's practice and the legacy of a departed loved one who was herself a photographer. By selectively obscuring details and embracing compositional ambiguity, Romero creates works that function as ‘cathartic rituals’, where the act of painting becomes a means to process absence. This darker palette marks a deliberate shift from his earlier, more colourful works.

Camilla Schön’s work translates profound emotional states into a lexicon of texture and gesture grounded in printmaking. Initially trained in techniques like drypoint on aluminum and photopolymer etching, Schön adapted when studio access became limited post-graduation. She began intuitively overdrawing existing prints with charcoal, pastel and pencil, transforming mechanically produced images into intimate, hand-worked artefacts. Her imagery – often derived from photographs of smoke, flame or elemental forms – becomes a palimpsest for mark-making. This fusion of precise print processes with expressive, intuitive drawing creates monochromatic works where texture, density and residue convey complex emotional landscapes.

Lulu Stephenson’s paintings explore memory as tangible material. Her process is fundamentally additive and subtractive: layers of paint are applied, then partially scraped away using tools like cold wax scrapers, creating textured, atmospheric grounds. Indistinct, dreamlike figures emerge from these excavated surfaces, inhabiting landscapes that suggest fleeting moments and psychological spaces. ‘I think of memory as a raw material’, she explains. ‘It sits in my studio as an almost-object, next to my paints, my palette. It has a weightiness to it, a physicality. Memory has the power to cast shadow and light, which I connect to through layers and layers of luminous paint. Paint exists in something of a parallel space, constructing reality while also confusing it.’

This exhibition showcases the diverse outcomes of supported studio time. Despite differing mediums and subjects, the residents share an engagement with materiality as a conduit for psychological exploration. Each artist leverages the physical properties of their chosen materials – from Stephenson’s excavated paint layers and Budden’s chromatic distortions to Schön’s etched palimpsests, Rocke’s wax-thickened impastos, Romero’s smeared photographic translations and Burdett’s dissolving glazes – to manifest intangible states: memory, grief, perception and the subconscious. Their processes are not merely technical but investigative, transforming raw materials and source imagery into resonant, often unsettling expressions of interior experience. The residency underscores the necessity of sustained inquiry and practical support in contemporary artistic practice, having provided these artists the essential space for this materially grounded inquiry into the psyche.